Mnesikles : the second architect on the Athenian Acropolis

Abstract:

Mnesikles was a Classical Greek architect, active circa 440, whose life cannot be reconstructed in detail. He was the architect of the Propylaea on the Athenian Acropolis, while adjacent buildings there, the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nikè, are attributed to him. What these three buildings have in common is their unprecedented design; especially the Erechtheum and the Propylaea violate the foremost rule of classical design by being asymmetrical. By contrast, the Parthenon as the main temple is a normative building on a monumental scale. Many reasons for their deviant appearance can be gathered from the extensive literature on all three. Whatever the influence of the vicissitudes of history or the irregular building sites may be, the real reason for the irregularity of the buildings auxiliary to
the Parthenon should be sought in Mnesikles’s purposeful design strategy. If the Propylaea, the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nikè are “blemished” buildings, according to classical norms, one needs to ask if Mnesikles did not intend it that way. The ambiguities in the secondary buildings on the Acropolis may justifiably be interpreted as purposeful disorderliness, the secondary buildings acting
as a foil to the symmetry and order of the main temple which is geometricised to the point of abstraction. It is proposed that Mnesikles designed the Propylaea and Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nikè not to rival the dominance and perfection of the Parthenon by consciously making them imperfect by incomplete architectural articulation, fragmentation, blemishing, and limiting of the scale.